Your family and friends try to find out what happened to you, but no one in authority will give them any details. All they know is that you are being “detained.” Eventually you may be released, or deported after a secret hearing.

        This isn't some tale from the gulag. Until Wednesday it was a practice that followed post-Sept. 11 guidelines from the U.S. Justice Department involving deportation hearings for immigrants designated as having “special interest” for the FBI.

        Such hearings were ordered closed by a Sept. 21 memorandum from the nation's chief immigration judge. The memo also prohibited such cases from being listed on regular court dockets and banned court administrators from even confirming when they took place.

        You might call such a memo a victory for the terrorists bent on destroying the American way of life.

        Fortunately for the good guys — by which I mean people who believe this country is special because it guarantees everyone the right to fair and open trials — Chief U.S. District Judge John W. Bissell of New Jersey ordered the practice stopped Wednesday.

        “Without an injunction, the government could continue to bar the public and press from deportation proceedings without any particularized showing of justification. This presents a clear case of irreparable harm to a right protected by the First Amendment,” Judge Bissell wrote.

        Judge Bissell is now my hero because he is the kind of person the Taliban, the fanatics of al-Qaida and dictators the world over hate.

        In other lands, governments hold secret hearings to deal quickly and quietly with their enemies. There aren't public trials or press coverage or defense lawyers — people just disappear. As Judge Bissell's ruling points out, that isn't the way it is supposed to happen in this country.

        We all know why the immigration memo was issued. We were attacked — all of us — by the hijackers of Sept. 11. None of us want that to happen again and most people want to make sure the people behind the terror are caught and punished. One of our initial reactions was to round up a lot of suspects — mostly Muslims with questionable immigration status.

        At one point there were more than 700 detainees, many of them held in jail cells in New Jersey, which is how Judge Bissell got involved. According to a Justice Department spokesman, that number was down to 104 as of Wednesday. What is not clear is how many were actually deported, how many led investigators to real terrorists and how many were simply released to go back to innocent lives.

        The Justice Department has not yet announced if it will appeal the ruling. Judge Bissell's ruling came in a challenge brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and some New Jersey newspapers that wanted to cover the deportation hearings. There are other challenges as well. Civil rights and public access groups told a Washington D.C. federal judge this week that the government is ignoring freedom of information laws by keeping secret the names of the detainees.

        In a statement issued after Judge Bissell's ruling Wednesday, the Justice Department said: “The closure of these hearings is vital to the ongoing efforts of law enforcement to take reasonable but necessary steps to protect our national security.”

        I don't buy that. Tossing a blanket over basic freedoms can't be good for our country. Too many mistakes can be made, too many innocent people can be hurt and it is too easy to keep spreading the blanket out a little further until, finally, it even covers you and me.

        Judge Bissell yanked the blanket off with a preliminary injunction Wednesday, but he said individual hearings can be closed on a case-by-case basis by the judges holding the hearings. That makes sense. Judges should have the power to close hearings under special circumstances — and the rest of us have the right to challenge such rulings. But the Justice Department tried to create a system beyond the rules that allowed no challenges.

        Contact David Wells at 768-8310; fax: 768-8610; e-mail: dwells@enquirer.com. Cincinnati.Com keyword: Wells.

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